Battery saver behaviour

Help Fairphone 5
1

What’s been you guy’s experience with the battery saver?
I’ve noticed that the phone seems to handle the mode quite poorly. Things become quite choppy. Apps take noticeably longer to load. All things that do seem like a result of lowered clock speeds. But it might just be too much.
Whenever I turn it on, the phone suddenly turns anemic and quite terrible to use.
Yet it kinda feels like the problem isn’t even it being enabled. But actually enabling it. The sudden switch. I’ve had youtube turn down to 3fps as it auto turned on at low battery. I’ve had the phone hang for a couple seconds as I would rotate the phone.
And what specifically prompted me writing this post: I pick up my phone from sleep. It’s at 8%, so battery saver must have turned on quite a bit ago (I have it set to enable at 10%). I unlock it. The app I had opened last rotates sideways, because I was holding the phone wrong. Aaaaand it hangs. Frozen. Can’t exit the app, can’t pull the shade down. Taking a screenshot did make the noise after about a ten second delay.
So out comes the battery for a force reset.

Have any of you used battery saver, and did you notice a heavily degraded performance? Or was it business as usual, but just at 60hz down from 90?

2

Maybe next time you might try to exit power saver mode by connecting the phone to power to see if this helps in such a status.
A force reset is also possible via long pressing power or power+vol down (>15s).

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3

I’ve used my FP5 almost exclusively in battery saver mode and haven’t experienced anything like that. I don’t really have any choppiness or noticeable slowdown. Screen rotation in general are handled very poorly by the phone though, so I already ended up in scenarios where only half the screen was usable, because the app rotated wrongly. (Usually when watching youtube videos full screen)

Another thing I’ve noticed, is that on very rare occasions, an app just loses its internet connection and won’t get it back until I close and reopen it.

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4

I didn’t mention it in the original post, but I actually did plug it in. It made the charging noise, but didn’t play the animation, and the screen was still frozen. Didn’t help.

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5

I’d like to update this thread with a bit more development on the experience.
My original post was blaming the battery saver mode for the sluggish performance. But after months and months of use, I realise that it’s actually the state of the battery charge that has a severe effect on performane.
I did some benchmarking with Antutu, to confirm my theory. Here are two benchmark results with a sufficently charged battery. One with battery saving disabled, and one with the saving enabled. (hilariously, some scores are higher with the battery saver run, which I did right after the regular run, in case you might think thermals are a concern)

------Battery saver disabled ------------Battery saver enabled-------

full battery full power
full battery full power1224×2700 187 KB
battery saver high battery
battery saver high battery1224×2700 189 KB

Then I let my phone discharge to 10%, at which point battery saver is automatically enabled, no matter what. You can not disable this behaviour. Only raise the treshold. I digress.
I manually disabled battery saver, and had an other run of the benchmark.

low battery no saver
low battery no saver1224×2700 187 KB

Behold, the scores are severely lower. EXCEPT for the gpu, which is interesting.
I was specifically surprised by Antutu’s UI scrolling test, in this low battery state. As pictures and UI elements struggled or failed to load during the benchmark, not to mention the severely choppy scrolling, even at the lighter parts of the test.

I’d very much like some other people’s input on this. I wouldn’t expect such severe performance cutbacks even from a battery saver mode. BUT, not only these cutbacks are TOO severe, they dont even seem to be caused by the battery saver itseld, but some automatic system that triggers based on battery charge.
Do you ever let your phone get below 10%, and do you ever notice it getting very unpleasantly sluggish in certain tasks? Can I please let my phone still go full out performance mode, even if it’s hanging on for dear life at 1% battery? Let me please decide when I want my phone to turn into a slideshow in the name of battery life.

I would like to add, that this behaviour causes 90% of my pain in Discord. And we all know Discord itself is a well made and efficient app amiright?
Youtube video playback is borderline unaffected, which is actually explained by the GPU benchmark results.
Other apps like Twitter, Telegram, Gmail, are mostly unaffected, save for the extra second to load image content sometimes. Like Telegram stickers, or user profile pictures.
And of corse, web browsing also becomes noticably choppier, but still not enough to warrant me writing this wall of text rant.

6

No. In fact my phone rarely triggers Battery saver, which I’ve set to turn on at 30%. This mode in itself is actually quite “mild”. To quote the blurb: turns on Dark theme and limits or turns off background activity, some visual effects, certain features and some network connections. In other words, it’s not affecting foreground very much.

I think you might get a better experience if you turn it on at a higher charge level. Battery saver will enable your phone to run for longer on a single charge, without too much impact on performance.

But do consider recharging before you get down to less than 10%. Take a power bank with you.